How IKEA tricks you into buying more stuff
thehustle.co
thehustle.co
Literally what you said.
This is like saying, “The medicine works on me but I don’t like the flavor so I hardly ever take it.”
The medicine doesn’t work on you!
We sometimes have no choice but to go to Ikea (in some furniture categories, in this country it's difficult-to-impossible to find options in between Ikea and excessively expensive) but we view it as a necessary evil, and always take the same approach: do a speed-run through the store (taking all shortcuts) until we hit the exact section we need. Sit, recline, feel, examine, decide... and then continue on the the next section.
The only area that sometimes defeats us is the kitchen-ware.
I should also mention their e-commerce business which is beyond terrible. Considering how many years they have had to get this right, this has to be their biggest failure by far.
And of course pick up some Swedish food in the little Ikea supermarket beyond the cash registers.
I've never understood how people get stuck following the designated route. Much faster to just take the shortcuts and stay of the (crowded) main path.
But the IKEA hate seems mostly based on snobbery and/or brand awareness. Like those stories about random tech things that shoehorn Apple or Telsa into the title because it gets people to click. And people seem to hate other, poorer people wearing the same clothes as them, using the same chairs etc. It's weirdly self-defeating behaviour.
This article's most interesting bit is the part when they discuss IKEA's focus on low prices:
> The main ingredient of the company’s affordability is a technique called flat packing.
> The company reduces manufacturing, logistics, and fulfillment costs by disassembling items and fitting pieces together in a box as tightly as possible. “We hate air” is a common mantra at Ikea: Every pocket of space is accounted for and minimized.
> “Ikea designs products with manufacturing and transit in mind from the get-go,” said Katelan Cunningham, of the logistics software company Lumi. “They design for the realities of the supply chain, rather than having to make sacrifices for it.”
> Obsessive changes in packaging have saved Ikea millions of dollars:
> When Ikea transitioned its Ektorp sofa to be flat packed, it shrunk its packaging for that product by 50%, reduced its logistics by 7,477 truckloads, and led to a 14% price reduction for consumers. > Repackaging the Jules office chair by separating the base and the seat saved the company ~$1.4m per year.
The banal thing is that IKEA is cheap for this level of quality. (and that this quality is good enough for most people).
> once an Ikea product hits the shelves, the company is militant about maintaining, or even reducing, its retail price
aka Jeff Bozos "your margin is my opportunity".
Being able to run the company with low margins are the best defence against competition.
I don't know if that was typo or deliberate. It's the first I've seen it, but I love it to the point I will forever spell it this way.
I have one and only one reason for hating IKEA, before IKEA furniture was delivered fully built, then IKEA disrupted the market by having people build their own stuff, which, among other things, allowed them to be significantly cheaper. Now, at least were I live you can't have furniture delivered pre-built (unless you buy antiques) but you can hire a handyman to come build it for more than the price difference was between unbuilt and built before IKEA came to dominate.
Aside from that I understand text better than I understand graphics so I am always at a disadvantage dealing with IKEA build instructions, having to go through the drawings 4-5 times trying to identify where two pieces look almost exactly the same but have a significant little difference that must be paid attention to - something they could easily do with a single sentence on the relevant pages describing the differences.
Actually then I guess I have two reasons I hate IKEA.
That doesn't add up from where I'm sitting. Hiring someone on Airtasker to build your furniture is about the same price as getting a delivery driver to drop off a piece of furniture.
If you're serious about saving money but struggle with DIY, just type your preferred IKEA product name into Facebook Marketplace. You can generally get them pre-assembled for about a third of the cost of new.
You missed the very beginning of his comment:
"at least were I live"
Where he lives is not where you live, or where I live. We all live different places with different levels of infrastructure and services available. Because things are different where you are does not negate his experience.
So Pax - 2 frames, hinged doors and fittings comes out to about $200+ for building it, little bit under 50 dollars for any order, for 30 dollars they take about the packing etc.
So obviously I end up building it myself in almost all cases, despite the fact that it takes me an hour more than it would everyone else because I always misbuild at least once and figure it out part of the way in, oh that had to be turned this way, I get it now! Could have saved me an hour with just writing "NOTE the small hole at the top edge of this picture, if you do not have that hole in the piece you are using you are using the wrong piece!" But Nope. Never gonna happen.
I'm in Australia, where the minimum wage is the highest in the world (Around US$20 for casual labour, even higher if you're covered by an industry award)!
If you want to pay $200 for an hour's semi-skilled work + $30 to throw a box away, that's on you. Unless Denmark has some incredibly odd demographics, there should be an army of dads on Facebook offering a mobile assembly service for a quarter of that price.
Where I live I can definitely still buy fully assembled luxury furniture. I’m hard pressed to think of anywhere that would sell you a new, assembled bookcase for under $500 though.
there are grown up people who can't follow simple graphic instruction to assemble a piece of furniture
there are grown up people who can't insert a duvet in it's cover... and they are proud of it
different people have different capabilities, thus many people are not able to read or write at my level or to handle higher level of abstractions, but that doesn't make me any better than them because I am not able to deal with visual information as completely as they are (which may be related to some disability)
when you announce that you are not very capable in something there's always somebody who has to talk shit about it.
on edit: fixed grammatical error entered while writing and dealing with hyperactive 4 year old.
Yes, that's why shipping an unassembled furniture works for the most of the folks just fine.
BTW, shipping more units per truck is all green, eco and saves the world.
There are also things that I find trivial and intuitive and other people struggle with. For example, telling "its" from "it's" is a common example.
Different strokes for different folks.
I have ADHD and perhaps some light autism (hard to say as a light autistic-like personality would seem perfectly reasonable given my earlier life), at any rate in high school - in the U.S - they decided I needed some testing and they gave me a battery of Reading comprehension / Math / Spatial reasoning tests, in the reading comprehension I tested at the top 1% of the population, math top 20% of the population, spatial reasoning lowest 3% of the population - which caused them to give me physical therapy for a year with a guy who had me do crab walks and a bunch of other physical exercises to make me capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time I guess. I have also since read there is some overlap with spatial understanding problems and autism.
At any rate I still have a hard time understanding schema diagrams and UML models and of course IKEA building instructions, but I understand directed graphs and tree structures pretty well.
It’s not at the IKEA price point (which is a large part of the business advantage that IKEA has).
Are there really no furniture stores that deliver to where you live?
https://www.bolia.com/ https://ilva.dk/ https://jysk.dk/ https://www.boconcept.com/da-dk/
I had to build stuff myself I bought there (although all offered services not priced to where I would want to take them). I also bought some stuff from Illums at one point I had to build.
Most of it is easy enough, but again, my feeling is just Ikea came in, drove the market price down by letting you build at home so everyone went in and did the same thing to compete, and now I cannot buy the things I want without building or paying a significant extra amount because the furniture business is no longer set to handle people not building it themselves - at least in Denmark.
From what I've seen in Italy, Sweden and Germany it seems the same, although that is just me visiting people and they have bought a bunch of stuff not just in Ikea but it needs building.
I’d love to see the return of quality goods that last forever. I have some inherited ethan allan furniture that was super expensive back in the day. It’s still holding up.
My sofa, TV stand, shelves, batteries, drinkware, plates and so on are surviving pretty well too. I've really only had two notable IKEA things break: glass tea jar shattered for unknown reasons, and the gas spring on my office chair broke. Thankfully the office chair had a 10-year warranty, so I had the entire chair replaced under warranty.
If you want design, go for that. If you want solid oak-levels of sturdiness, go for that. Me, if I need a chair/cupboard/wardrobe/..., I don't want to break the bank, but I do want choice of something that'll last long enough.
They're cheap enough so that i wasn't hesitant about trying modifications myself, yet sturdy enough that the furniture survived for over a decade and a half so far, and going strong.
That, RIGHT THERE, is a real hidden gem.
If you look around, especially after spending just a bit of time observing and educating yourself, you can find astonishing bargains. They are everywhere, on Craigslist, in thrift stores, etc.. Where I live (New England area), you can find fine mahogany tables, dining room sets, cabinets, etc. for truly cheap money, often even free. It seems that most people these days either just do not appreciate the value of good furniture, or literally do not know what they are missing.
Obviously, you can find antiques that require fortunes to purchase, but that is really just the highly visible tail of the market. Just find a set of styles that suits you, and look for good construction and finishes. For the cost of an Ikea piece that'll last a few years, you can buy furniture that will last a lifetime (and already has lasted several). And the search is fun and builds fun memories.
Highly recommended
I grew up in a home 90% furnished with heirlooms and there are two antique categories I'd never buy for my own use: Dining chairs and beds. They just don't have the size and robustness I find comfortable. Antique beds for two use about the same mattress size as I used for a single growing up. It's horrible. And I can't rock old chairs back and forth without disassembling them spontaneously.
Now day beds, consoles, tables? Cookware? That's all my jam. (except for silver cutlery, taste horrible)
My mom has one pink plastic IKEA office chair that's been a trooper. It's developed a stress fracture where the back meets the seat that goes at least 70% through the material from me rocking it and the thing is. still. holding. up.
Edit: Damn HN, some humor, that’s all.
The weight alone of furniture made with real wood would make shipping multiple times more expensive than the cost of the item.
That's obviously not true. An 77 1/2" IKEA Hemnes bookcase sells for $199 and is made of pine. A comparable 75" bookcase[0] made of alder costs $550 with free shipping. Since alder costs about 70% more than pine[1], there's no way shipping adds "multiple times... the cost of the item."
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[0]: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/hemnes-bookcase-white-stain-903...
[1]: https://www.buildwithrise.com/stories/benefits-of-alder-wood
I don't like IKEA furniture because with very few exceptions, it's cheaply made. I want furniture made from durable materials like solid wood that continue to look nice after years of use and not just when it's new.
IKEA can be fine if the pieces you buy don't get touched very often or you buy their rare pieces that are well made.
Not if you factor in the cost of repeatedly replacing your IKEA furniture
Sure if you buy a $10 coffee table then it's likely to quickly fall apart but they have a lot of better quality products if you look.
For people in that bubble, with a few exceptions (Lack!) IKEA furniture is designed to be disassembled and reassembled multiple times while lasting decades. It's an absolute godsend for people who are moving houses every few years.
Most of the garbage flat-pack you see smashed to bits on the side of the road is a knock-off made by another brand with ridiculously shoddy materials. I've personally cracked open an Amart bookshelf before to find honeycombed cardboard providing most of the structural integrity.
what? Ikea was always the cheap brand, not expensive one, nor premium one - there is no snobbery attached to it.
I don't hate them, on the contrary I'm a regular customer that doesn't mind assembling.
I dislike the "maze", yes I know the shortcuts, but I can't help wondering what would happen in an emergency.
In an office, one is typically on some crazy floor and can't use the elevator. Home, perhaps one is asleep in one's pyjamas.
At least with the alternative, you sometimes get to pick from more than a handful of the same designs... I quickly grow tired of seeing the exact same Ikea furnishings in so many homes! I was so glad to finally not have a "KIVIK" in my home after decades of the same design. I'd also happily live the rest of my days never seeing a "POÄNG" chair ever again... That I even know these odd-sounding to me in my native tongue words for these products is a massive testament to their extreme ubiquity now.
EDIT: Out of curiosity I googled how many POÄNG chairs are out there, apparently over 30 million and grows at 1.5 million a year!
If you go to a boutique furniture store, you never know if you will see that table ever again. If you like something, you have to panic buy it right there. And you never know if that product line is a one off, with no interest in long term sales.
It's not because I have strong feelings about the products or the company, or just that I dislike shopping. There aren't any other stores that create the same reaction. Stores filled with products I hate, stores filled with products I love, stores filled with temptations, big stores, little stores, ugly stores, beautiful stores, malls, they're just places to shop, and while they might make me feel bored or irritated after a while, I don't get nauseous. They don't fill me with dread.
I honestly don't know why IKEA stores affect me like that. At first I thought it was anxiety about being disoriented, but it happens to me even in the local store where I know the layout. I have a lot of faith in habituation, mindfulness, and thinking things through as ways of mitigating anxiety, but they haven't helped. The only thing that affects me as viscerally and predictably is my fear of heights, so whatever it is, it feels primal.
I know this makes me look a lil crazy to others in the store, but if/ when I go to IKEA (for the prices, honestly), I have no qualms running through the store at my easy pace, to get what I need and get out as quickly as possible.
Then walk in from the exit side straight into the warehouse and pick up the boxes from the aisles you identified before.
The only drawback is that often things which are shown as in-stock are actually not (maybe it is a pandemic era thing).
I've purchased $100's worth of item in less than 20 minutes.
That seems off, since IKEA is basically the low-cost alternative to fancy brands. I buy in IKEA for the low-cost, good-enough & functional furniture, but with the understanding that it's definitely fairly low quality.
But other stores have caught on to flatpack shipping - you can get solid wood dressers for example from Target shipped as a flatpack and easiesh to assemble (have a power screwdriver or drill torqued down low).
The problem is some of the things you have no idea of the durability until you’ve used it.
For example this is good: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/hejne-4-section-shelving-unit-s... especially for the price (accommodates rack units!) but this is an absolute pain in the arse https://www.ikea.com/us/en/cat/ivar-system-11703/ to get working correctly (I threw it away and burned the rest after the third time shelves bounced and collapsed).
I ended up replacing most of it with wire shelving from Uline.
The IVAR shelves have also started cheaping out. The shelving support rails/clips/whatever were metal and are now plastic. Perhaps they're strong enough but our old version has been going strong since the mid-90s under heavy use. Glue-lam is a strong material.
We are in our 50s and live like students...
When I lived in a place that had IKEA stores I dreaded going there, but I never regretted it. Now I live where there aren't any, and I rather miss them.
But they aren't really any cheaper than the competition when you compare like for like. As soon as you get to real wood they're usually pretty comparable to the rest of the market.
There's some shops that offer significantly worse (and often cheaper) quality furniture. I think part of the success of Ikea is that it strikes the right balance between quality and price: you get decent quality for a decent price.
IKEA’s value prop is that for the same price as places like Wayfair you get a little better quality, the stuff looks good together in a house, and it’s not offensively designed or chugey.
shudders so much faux weathered “farmhouse” garbage.
But a lot of their furniture is solid wood.
That said, Ikea has plenty of solid wood furniture, mostly of pine, and if you apply wood glue to the pegs during assembly it’s extremely durable and long lasting for it’s price. I have a dresser from Ikea that was “stain yourself”. I assembled and sealed it when I was 14. I’m almost 40, and it’s still in fantastic condition.
Some of it is chipboard with veneer, and the rest is massive but cheapo soft wood like pine (and that’s the “luxury” bracket in IKEAs offering, the most expensive in the store.
It depends on what you call a cheap product.
About everything in my home comes from IKEA. Every furniture looks like brand new after decades. The only items that are damaged were damaged during moving between houses. Yes IKEA furniture is sometimes pretty bad at being moved in a truck.
But, while it’s not premium, the quality, for me have something really important : it’s consistent. In a lot of shops, you barely discover at home if you bought something of bad or high quality. At IKEA, you at least know it’ll never be bad quality because even the cheapest item comes in "ok" quality.
I’ve bought literally hundreds pieces of furniture plus an entire kitchen and I’ve been only disappointed once, with a couch, that I still have.
The chipboard crap at most places is here today gone tomorrow. You may not like something about a Billy bookcase, but it’s known.
Thank you!
Now I'll either 'go on the tour' or get the item and out, usually a mix touring a couple areas. The food is also a really good deal and somewhat different from the usual fare. I remember getting a bocconcini and tomato salad for a few dollars. The food is designed to keep you shopping, but you can take advantage of it separately.
Just look at the employees move about, they use double doors to move between sections much more efficiently than you do by using the dotted lines on the ceiling signs.
Around here you can buy things online from IKEA but they make the shipping and delivery a pain and more expensive than their competition.
Long time friend of mine is an engineering director @ Article Furniture (hiring BTW), and companies like that seem to be doing well out of the transition. If I am now used to buying almost anything online, and can now buy sleek modern furniture online without hassle and with excellent logistics, why would I drag my ass to an IKEA?
I don't feel like COVID is much of a threat anymore at least not right now, but the thought of sharing stale air and maneuvering a shopping cart around a rats maze of junk still fills me with dread. The only thing that would get me there is the free EV charging, just cuz.
That's a strange thing to say, I've bought multiple pieces of furniture from them online, I thought they were great.
The sticker price of the delivery sounds high at first glance (~$100 USD), when picking up from the store is "free". But having to rent a van, drive to/from IKEA, and do manual loading/unloading heavy boxes up three flights of stairs... that's a lot of time that would be spent, and I think I prefer paying for the delivery.
With that said, my wife and I still love Ikea, and we've done some pretty extreme things to buy their stuff in-person. This includes driving many hours for weekend getaways to the nearest city with an Ikea to do a bunch of things (zoo, aquarium, etc.) but primarily to get something from the Ikea, and dealing with some very sketchy unofficial third-party services that help buy Ikea goods (at a 2x markup) in places where you couldn't otherwise get them (Hawaii and Korea). Even with a 2x markup, there are some great deals.
it's "more expensive" because competitors put shipping in the higher base price.
Naturally this makes the layout of Ikea important, because if you never go through the lighting department, you're not going to remember that you'd actually been wanting a desklamp and pick one out. But this isn't some sort of clever psychological hack thats tricking you into buying a lamp you don't need.
For reasonably disciplined people looking at just about the whole store and collecting as much as possible of the intersection between what they should buy and what is available is the normal way to amortize the cost of all that walking, and planning to buy something is only a worst-case guarantee that an IKEA visit will be worthwhile.
As for self-assembled stuff perceived to be more valuable, I also think it is nice to know that you can assemble, and more importantly, disassemble it yourself. It's more repairable (IKEA sells spare parts as well), makes moving easier, and also allows you to "hack" IKEA products: https://ikeahackers.net/
Except that IKEA product last far shorter. We moved frequently due to being in academia, Billy bookshelves are often pretty much worn-out after disassembling and assembling them 2-3 times. We had IKEA sofas (not the cheapest models) that would wear out in 3-5 years. The surface of our relatively expensive IKEA dining table cracked open twice. They replaced it, no questions asked, but their quality is quite mediocre.
Before IKEA, in The Netherlands Lundia bookshelves were popular. They were made of massive wood and designed to be easy to assemble/disassemble. They would often last and be passed between generations. I knew fellow students who had 30 year old Lundia bookshelves that were passed on from their parents and moved from house to house and then from student home to student home.
Besides that, I really hate shopping at Ikea. It's far too chaotic and annoying. (The trick is going on weekdays and knowing all the shortcuts.)
The only annoying thing about the Billy bookshelves is the backplate which you are supposed to attach using nails. We replace those with small screws instead, making it much easier to disassemble and reassemble, although there definitely is a limit to how often you can do that while using the same holes.
Not sure what you compare, solid wood assembled with PVA and joints is not a subject of any disassembly method at all.
I fall into the “IKEA as Disneyland” camp. For me there’s tons of inspiration from their designs and layouts that I wouldn’t have thought about on my own —- this is particularly true for organization and maximizing utility in small spaces.
Most people are not professional interior designers so it helps to draw inspiration from professionals. If left on their own the things people “think they need” is far less than the things they actually need — people need more, and that’s not a bad thing. I’m not talking about over the top consumerism or aimlessly amassing stuff. I’m certain this is a lot of appeal to shows on HGTV. You see how they design something similar to your house then steal the ideas.
I’m also attracted to their minimalistic design. Simple designs and neutral colors never seems to go out of style and blend well with everything. Given IKEAs diversity the same products are sold around the world —- Europe, Japan, America —- so they need a timeless and borderless approach. I’ve probably bought far less from IKEA because I never feel the design is old.
I also like the little stories about they inspiration for design. The article mentions how cheap product make IKEA seems like a bargain but even the cheap stuff is well thought out. One designer commented that the plush toys don’t have plastic eyes, they are all stitched / embroidered. The designer realized this after seeing a child with a stuffed animal that only had one eye. The designer thought no child’s toy should eyeless and fixed try problem.
IKEA isn’t the only store where good design sells products. Muji is another. I almost always walk out of there buying more than planned. I think it’s easy to attribute this to psychological manipulation but sometimes making a better product and demonstrating how he utility is the real secret sauce.
For people interested in design, particularly the theory side, check out the work by Kenya Hara, the design director for Muji.
Just get a bottle of very good wood glue like Titebond III and apply it to every surface that touches another surface while you’re putting it together and most of the shaky fall apart if you lean on it qualities can be eliminated.
It also uses the cheap food trick ($1.50 hot dog, $5 rotisserie chicken) as well.
I tell myself I am going to run in and get one thing, but I come out with my shopping cart full.
Because Costco changes what they carry on a regular basis as well as the promotions, whenever you see a sale, you want to immediately grab a bunch of stuff.
Also add its super friendly return policies and you are thinking “If I don’t like it, I can always just bring it back”.
I know I bought a TV and thought it looked ok / a bit small but then when I got home it was huge. I had measured prior to going and was between two sizes.
I think a key difference is you don’t feel tricked about the quality, whereas half the crap from IKEA has been absolutely insanely cheap quality and undurable as all get out (and the other half is a good deal for the price; the hard part is distinguishing- you have to identify the weakpoints that will be problematic in your use case).
Personally I'm a big fan of their simple designs and some of the style, and a regular buyer of book shelves.
It handles my branded car credit card, among a lot of other things.
https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/suppliers/food-and-drink-manufac...
Ikea maximises surface area of things for sale as you move through. The human gut uses the same trick to maximise getting food into you blood via villi.
* As a side note, I know that Ikea has shortcuts. Thank fuck! But if you walk through the store wandering aimlessly following everyone else, you are being maximised.
I ordered a desk online. The previous time I ordered something from IKEA, I received a bazillion messages from them on the day of delivery.
This time, I received one message: the desk was being picked up. After that: total silence. At the end of the day, I called to ask what's up. Apparently they didn't have the desks, and it would be months until they would be back in stock.
What I learned: If you don't get stalked about the status of your delivery, you don't need to stay at home. You're not getting it.
What I did: told them I'd wait for the next delivery, and expressed my annoyance. Got a coupon because of that, then cancelled. I couldn't help myself: if they play tricks on me, I have to return the favour.
I recently tried to order a chair (it was in stock when I ordered).
On the delivery day I got delivered two other items in the same order and later I got a call about how they couldn't deliver the chair because it out of stock.
Got a full refund for the chair price (without any action on my part), a coupon for smaaaal amount and a 1/3rd part of the delivery fare as a 'compensation'.
About the tricks, I'm sure everyone employs some; from grocery stores keeping more expensive stuff at easier to reach heights to others promoting a few products at discounted price while most of the others are inflated, so one gets there and buys everything, including more expensive ones, anyway because they know that driving to another store would be a much bigger nuisance. I wish there was a book on how to defend ourselves against all those marketing tactics, that is, one written for common people, not for salesmen.
But IKEA has had a devastating effect in two ways:
1. Wherever they’ve established themselves, they’ve devastated the ‘middle’ ground of quality-made furniture. In England before IKEA there used to be an immense choice of sofa and furniture makers, many of them producing really well-designed and reasonably priced items, like HABITAT for instance (which significantly was bought by IKEA sometime in the 90s). The large number of choices like this, but even other smaller-scale designers get wiped-out by IKEA’s steamroller.
2. The other problem has always been the way IKEA will copy a design from a smaller designer, and wipe them out that way. These days they’re a bit smarter about doing this, and instead of copying designs and getting the internet backlash they’d suffer nowadays, they partner with cool designers (like Danish Hay) and get ‘cred’ instead.
So even though we probably save some money in the short term, we’ve lost a flourishing landscape of smaller and more diverse, and more local alternatives.
But you can still get lost because the exit isn't.
If they were really committed to dark-patterning your shopping experience, they would make inventory harder to find and play games with their pricing (like what Best Buy does for expensive phones, i.e. display the per-month price of the phone with its total amount underneath it).
I strongly suspect I'm the chump who buys the 3rd unit.
I feel it’s either IKEA or pay 5 times the price for the local furniture shop.
I was recently shopping for baby beds and I was absolutely convinced IKEA had the safest and cheapest baby bed by far. No contest.
Out entire economic system depends on people buying more and more stuff, stuff they usually don't need, and they only buy because they were "tricked" to buy.
Which ended up turning into a friendly debate with Michael Pollan: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/07/23/334076398/epis...
TL:DR; there are a lot more logistical reasons they put milk in the back of the store than there are psychological ones.
I don't feel like Ikea is necessarily a comparison. A grocery store is supposed to be convenient. I go to Ikea because I don't know what I want yet, and their showrooms are excellent. And since I plan on spending half a day there, of course I want to buy a few things when I'm there.
The headline is click-baity…no one who had been to IKEA once has ever been tricked by any of this the second time.
i wonder what the proportion of a typical spend looks like breaking down planned vs impulsive
my guess is majority of money is actually planned and while you buy more items impulsively they’re usually small/disposable/refill purchases (napkins/chopping boards/cups/plastic bags)
It does feel outright illegal.
When I do go I'm the correct direction it is a power walk where I shoot through sections to bypass slow walkers and use their shortcuts (they do technically exist)
Thank you, captain obvious... the motivation for the store layout can hardly escape one's notice I would say.
But the less-obvious point, to me anyway, is the use of _decoy pricing_. Indeed, I never feel I can figure out whether the price of some IKEA product is high or not.
> The Billy bookcase — a product so beloved that one is sold every 5 seconds
You know what they say, a sucker is born every second... or 5 seconds. Those infernal pieces of rickety cardboard! People should be liable for bringing guests into homes with Billy bookcases.
> one-way path
Actually, more like two paths, because (at least in the stores I've seen) you can get to the "market hall", the latter half of your visit, without going through the showrooms.